Delurk, c'mon, you know ya wanna

In the sidebar, I have a little note that tells you that IP tracking is ON and I SEE YOU!, but I've never really written about it before. I added that tracker to the blog more than six months ago out of genuine curiosity; who READS this garbage that I write?

And most of the time, people find the blog when they're searching for the quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, usually on Google. Every now and then someone will check out the site from a comment I've left on another blog. I know who my regular readers are, for the most part. All of the stats are interesting to my geek nature.

But yesterday, my angsty rant about Jensen Ackles really brought people out in droves. I had what I think is the highest count yet for a single day, for me. And no so much from people searching HIM on Google, either, which considering the number of websites devoted soley to him (I've read estimates of somewhere around 20,000, if you're keeping track, but Google gets over a half million hits when you type 'Jensen Ackles') isn't really surprising.

What surprises me most, I suppose, is that when I'm doing what I intended to do when I started the blog, which was write about women's rights and liberal politics, I get very little feedback, which makes me feel like I'm standing on a soapbox on a busy street corner, screaming my lungs out, and no-one is paying any attention. Although in our celebrity-0bsessed culture, it really ought not surprise me at all. Sigh. (Not that I'm immune to that celebrity obsession...see yesterday's post and one titled "Fanatic" in February of 2007, plus my blogroll which lists the Go Fug Yourself girls, The Superficial, and Hot Gossip on MSN....)

But getting back on topic....I don't get too many comments every day, even though I see that on an average day, I get somewhere between 15-30 hits. So DELURK, people. I wanna know who you are, what brought you here. Leave a comment. You know you wanna.

This Celebrity Obsession? Has. Got. To. STOP.

So I'm chatting online with the sister who lives in NYC and she casually mentions that she's changed her view of my avatar, which is of course a picture of Jensen Ackles.

"Awwww," I responded, "Don't you like my cute actor? What did you change it to?"

"Some pic of you from xmas," she says. "I don't like looking at the little boy."

And I feel a completely irrational stab of, not anger, no, but rejection. I type a response full of teen angst that says he isn't a little boy (he is around the same age as this sister) and he's cute (this is my avatar pic on Google Chat, and helloooo, that's hot!) and blah blah blah blah, but I don't get a chance to send it because before I can, she sends me a link to Social Explorer and I'm off to geek around the maps for about an hour. A.D.D.? Me? No, why do you ask? Ooo, look, something shiny.

When I came back and read at our conversation again, I felt a little twinge of irritation at myself, and I realized that this obsession of mine has perhaps become a bit silly. I've made a few new friends online over the whole thing, and I'm really happy about that. New friends are great, and the longer you're out of University, the harder they are to come by. So that is to be treasured. I've been having a lot of fun in the CW forums, and Sunday, believe it or not, actually had a conversation about liberal vs. conservative politics with the kids in my favorite thread on the CW board. Really! I know, I was surprised too. The main forum that I've been participating in, JRA Unlimited, has some really great women on it from all over the world. One of the admins is in Brazil, other members are in England, Australia, Germany, Canada, Spain and Portugul...and besides being free to be completely ridiculous fangirls there, we talk about lots of other things.

I wonder where the line between fan and nutjob is. How close am I to treading it?

I guess I'm trying to reassure myself that I'm not crazy by all this angsty ranting, and my rationale goes something like this..."If I was nuts, I wouldn't be worried about it. Therefore, since I am worried about it, I'm not nuts."

There's a trivia game on the Anything But Ordinary board that took up a big chunk of time for me on Sunday, searching for a line from a particular episode. I watched parts of two different episodes looking for "who said that line?" and then I watched another complete episode to find a line of my own that would be hard enough for others to guess. Now that, that is silly. I'll freely admit to it. Sillier still, probably, is that I was thinking about starting a thread just like it on JRAU. So I can play the game on TWO sites, y'all.

Maybe I need a version of a 12-step program..."Hi, I'm Lucy, and I'm addicted to all things Jensen Ackles, I've been an addict for about 2 months." Oh, wait, I there's a forum for that, and I joined it. Yeah. Oy! Sigh.

Someone help me.

Please?

Soon!

Gloriously No Longer Stuck

In trying to describe the writing process, and what happens in my head, I'm totally lost on how to explain how I got unstuck. I was stuck for about a week, editing, editing, editing, and staring at the screen, trying to figure out how to move forward. Then I'd jump away from that, visit the forums, and come back to it, to stare blankly again at a point in the story that just couldn't seem to move on. It was very frustrating.

The book, as I have said, is almost all that I think about. How to make it better. How to improve a scene. How to make the reader see the same thing that I'm seeing in my imagination. I've told a bunch of people that I'm writing a book, hell, I've told the whole world, potentially, here. But it isn't all that I talk about, most of the time I don't mention it unless someone else brings it up.

Yesterday, I was on the forums, as usual, with about 6 tabs open on Firefox, and I got a phone call telling me that it was time to go. I gave the book one last look and signed out of all the forums, going downstairs and getting into the car. My mother had come to pick me up, my dad and DH were working on a project at my dad's office. The office is about 15-20 minutes from my home, and as we drove, we talked about the weather and the project the guys are working on, and I was staring out the window, thinking about the book. My mother's been asking to read it, and avidly interested about what it is about; I'm not ready to share it just yet, I've told her over and over. (Sorry! Not yet, either!) Seemingly, though, out of the blue, she asked me how it was going, and I told her about being stuck, and gave her some details, for the very first time, of what it is about. I told her about how I couldn't figure out how to move from where I was to the next plot twist, and as I was telling her about it, I just got a sudden flash of inspiration that if I simply went back and re-wrote from a certain point, changing a few details, the story would move forward naturally.

When I talk about knitting, I often say that my fingers itch to work on something; that I get this urge to have the yarn in my hands. With the writing, I'm feeling something similar, that I have a NEED to get in front of a keyboard and get cracking. Perhaps this is a manifestation of my OCD, I dunno, but when we got to my dad's office, I wanted to run right to a computer to work on it immediately.

The plan, however, was to leave the office and go to dinner. But since the plan is not often what happens, the boys were still working, and my mother and I stood around for a while, waiting for them. When I could see that it wasn't going to just be a few more seconds, (They were working on a car, did I mention that? No? Well, now you know.) I pushed myself up from the bumper of my dad's truck, and I told my mother, "I need to write. Now."

And I ran up the stairs to the office portion of the building, without a further word to anyone. I got about 10 minutes of clacking happily away on the keyboard before they yelled up from the garage that they were ready to go. But I'm unstuck! And I know what to do, where to go!

The Internet is such an amazing thing. I don't know if I've mentioned before that I'm writing the book inside of Google Documents, which means that I can work on it from any computer in the world that is connected to the Internet. So I'm not limited to the desktop at home; I can work on it wirelessly on my laptop at a Starbucks, I can work on it at my dad's office. And I can share it with anyone in the world that has a Google account, when I am ready to do that. Gotta love Google.

Now, if I could only dedicate more time every day to actually working on it, it might be in a bookstore near you soon.




One other thing to share today......

Apparently, I'm not evil enough to be banned in China. I saw this on Aunty Marianne's Blog, Tomato and Basil Sandwiches, and like her, I am much disappointed by the fact that I'm not enough of a rabble-rouser to be banned. Guess I'm less of a punk anarchist than I thought. Bummer.

stuck, Stuck STUCK!

Dammit. Remember how I've been breezily chatting about how well the book is going, how it just seems to flow from heaven only knows where? Yeah. I'm stuck. It sucks. I know where I want to go; I know the next big plot twist; I know the next few fun scenes I want to write, but I don't know how to get there from where I am now. And I may have written myself into a corner, so to speak.

I don't yet know how the story will end. Do I go with the cliched happy ending? I think I have to. But there is part of me that wants to end it not happy, so that I can come back and write more about it. The book is about two primary characters, a man and a woman. These two characters are (almost) all that I think about. Even though I'm not totally sold on what I've named them. The male lead has gone through at least 3 name changes thus far and the female...I've changed her name twice now. But she's also always changing her name throughout the story, so that's completely in character. Hee.

I've been editing and editing and editing over the last few days. I've asked someone to read what I've written thus far (taking MotherMe's advice) and I want it to be in the 'best' shape that it can be before they read it.

I'm thinking about what the book says about me as a person...all the writing advice I've ever come across that I thought was worth a damn said "Write about what you know." and I thought the first time I saw that, and still think now, that is good advice and it is complete bullshit. If everyone only wrote about what they know, there would only be biographies to read. Sure, sure, you can argue that all sci-fi and fantasy springs from mythology, and you need only be well-read in the classics to construct a fantasy book, and maybe you'd be right. But if Anne McCaffrey had stuck to strictly what she KNEW, would we have her description of FTL space-flight, or the Dragonriders of Pern series for that matter? Somehow, I don't think so.

The woman's character is not really a lot like me, but that's been a conscious effort on my part. So maybe she's aspects of me that I don't like to share or that I'm unaware of. And writing the guy has been tough, although you're in her head space, not his, so you don't really know what he's thinking. Most of the time. And telling more than that would be telling more than I'm ready to, so onward.

Plus I want this posted before the calendar turns over to March 4th, so that's all for now.

More on Scooter Libby OR dipping my toe into the dirty waters of blogging about sex.

The jury is still out on Scooter Libby's perjury trial, but I was checking the news wires and found a few things. One, and this is of particular interest to me because I'm writing a book myself, Scooter published a book in 1996 called The Apprentice. Here's a link to Amazon's page about the book. Please check that out, and then come back to me. I'll wait.

(Hums a bit of Metallica)

All right? You back? Good.

Scooter? Is one seriously fucked-up sick puppy, y'all. I'm not going to write about my own perversions, I'll leave delicious things like that to Girl With a One-Track Mind, or Belle du Jour. But I will say that I'm pretty open minded about all things sexual. For the most part, I think you ought to do whatever works for you. I draw the line, however, at necrophilia and bestiality. The old bbs boards had some abbreviations that entertained me...YKINMK (your kink is not my kink) YKINOK (your kink is not OK) and those both apply in spades here. Not only does he write about bestiality and necrophilia, but bestiality WITH necrophilia, child pornography and child prostitution. Yuck? And how on earth did this get published?

I'd like to say something scathing about neo-conservatives and their hang-ups about sex, but the joke seems to be just out of reach for me. Also too much of an obvious answer. Insert your own here, please.


There's another story in the Wilmington Star about The Idiot Administration and Scooter that I'd like to direct your attention to. This is exceedingly well-written stuff.


Finally, my punk ideals are offended yet again. Earlier this year I complained about a credit card commercial using a very bad redone version of a Soup Dragons song. Today I saw a Wendy's commercial using a Violent Femmes song, Blister in the Sun. Watching Keith Olberman on MSN and he used a Nine Inch Nails song. I'm so annoyed by this. Mostly? Because it makes me feel old. I now understand how my parents felt when Nike started using the Beatles Revolution to sell sneakers. Sigh.

Bento Box Madness

I bought a bento box like this one on eBay about a week or so ago. It arrived yesterday. I first read about bento boxes on WellFed, when someone, I don't remember who, wrote an article about her Mr. Bento and how it was helping her post-gastric surgery weight loss program. I subsequently developed a minor obsession over bento boxes. (See, I do get obsessive about things other than hot young TV actors. Really.) I read everything I could point my mouse to about them, discovering the Flickr community dedicated to all things Mr. Bento, several great blogs about bento, and then, the hallelujah chorus rang out in my head when I decided to check eBay for a bento box of my own. I had decided that I didn't want a Mr. Bento; I wanted something cute.

And is it ever cute! There's a cute little fork that goes with the set, cute matching chopsticks, with their accompanying case, a little strap to keep the boxes tied together, and a bag to carry it all in. Cute, cute, cute!

DH puts up with me buying things from eBay because I have not yet purchased a car, a house, or major furniture. Some dolls, some books, some yarn, y'know, harmless stuff. He watched me open all the pieces and parts of my new bento box last night with growing incredulity. "What IS that?" He asked, rolling his eyes at yet another needless acquisition.

"A Japanese lunch-box," I responded gleefully. "Isn't it CUTE?"

"How could you possibly fit enough into that for a whole lunch?" He wondered, noting that it is six inches wide, 3.15 inches across, and when all 3 pieces are stacked one on top of the other, no taller than about 4.5 inches. The whole thing fits into a bag no bigger than a 20 ounce bottle of water.

Plenty of room, I assured him. See, two compartments for food! So much fun! He rolled his eyes again and asked how long until dinner was ready. So I made something kind of bento inspired for dinner and brought it with me today for my yummy lunch. The fish dish was inspired by the Fast Fish cookbook and the quiona salad recipe is adapted from Well Fed.

Parchment Wrapped Fish with Quiona Salad

Fish
2 large SQUARE pieces of parchment paper
2 fillets any mild, white fish...I use Basa
2 T soy sauce
1 t your favorite hot sauce (I use Sirachi here)
1 T brown sugar
1/4 c lime juice
Zest of 1 lime
Juice of 2 limes
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 c chopped fresh cilantro
1/4 c olive oil

Oven 400F

Combine soy, hot sauce, sugar, juice, zest and garlic. Slowly drizzle oil in, as if you were making a vinaigrette. Marinate the fish in this mixture 15 minutes in the fridge, turning once.

Lie one square of parchment on a flat work surface. Place the fish diagonal across the parchment, and bring up the bottom point of the square. Fold in the left and right sides, then flip the packet over, tucking the top corner into the space left at the bottom. You're making a small envelope full of fishy goodness. Bake on a tinfoil lined cookie sheet in the oven 15 minutes. Cut packets open and slide fish onto plates. Serve hot.

While the fish marinates and bakes, make the quiona salad.

1 c quiona
2 cups water
zest of 1 lime
juice of 2 limes
2 T sesame oil
1/4 c olive oil
1/4 c cilantro, chopped fine
Grape tomatoes...about 1/2 cup
2-3 ribs celery, chopped fine
1 seedless cucumber, peeled, seeded, cut into fourths and diced

Follow package directions for quiona. It is a grain just like rice, it simply bears close watching. When it is done, spread onto another tinfoil lined cookie sheet to speed the cooling process. In a large bowl, combine the zest and the juice, and whisk oils in. Add cilantro, and vegetables, allowing them to soak in the dressing. When the quiona has cooled, add it to salad, toss, and add more olive oil if desired. Serve cold.

Dinner was wonderful, and I didn't eat all of my piece of fish intentionally, saving it for today's lunch. It fit beautifully into the bottom tray of my dragonfly bento, and I filled the top with quiona salad. That left a bit of room in the bottom container, so I added a mini muffin liner and filled it with about a tablespoon of blanched, slivered almonds. I closed both containers, fitted the strap around them, and put it in its cute little bag in my fridge. Brought it with me to work, and had a wonderful lunch. The bento box is microwave safe, but not dishwasher safe, which is the only downfall as far as I am concerned.

Definitely enough food, too. Yum!

Brain-Dumping Day Again

So as I have designated Tuesdays as official brain-dumping day, today I'm going to write about another old job.

By "brain-dump," I mean that I'm dumping a bunch of random thoughts in my head out on to the computer screen and seeing what comes of it. Perfecting my storytelling skills, as the quote from David Mamet says above. There's a funny line in a song by Tommy Lee, of Motley Crue fame, on the "Tommyland, The Ride" album (yes, I will admit to owning that, with a slight cringe), in the song Good Times where he says "All the trash in my head, gotta throw it away". I like that line. Wish that I could, sometimes, ya know?

I dearly wish that there was such a thing as a Pensieve, as JK Rowling writes about in the Harry Potter books. Pensieves allow you to remove thoughts and ideas from your head and store them for later reflection or because you don't want to think about them. I could get rid of quite a bit of my own trash that way!

Back to the old jobs, then, I'm really not going to write about Supernatural, Jensen Ackles or Dean Winchester today, really. That is, of course, some of what stomps through my brain on a daily basis, but I'm trying to remember that I live in the real world. (Oh, go on then. You've never had a crush on a celebrity? Riiiight.) No, I'm not going to post any of the pictures I found, or links to the episode recaps on Television Without Pity, which made me howl with laughter. No. I'm not. Really. And I'm not going to bitch, at all, about the fact that the show is on a month-long hiatus. The next new episode doesn't air until March 15th. The Ides of March?!? CW television network, you're killing me. Yeah, OK, all right, I'm a liar. Here. Take note, please of the pretty.

Where was I? Ah yes, old jobs. I wrote here about working for the cash vault of a large Midwestern bank, and said that the next job I had at the bank would have to be a story for another day. I graduated from University in 1998, and the bank began making vague noises that they were going to outsource the vault's operations to an armoured carrier service, in a cost-cutting effort. My co-workers, who were really nice women, but not well educated, couldn't see the writing on the wall, and kept telling me that there was "no way that the corporation would be able to do what we do by outsourcing."

They were 1000% wrong, as it turns out, and I quietly began looking for another position within the bank that required my degree. When I had been trying to leave the first branch of the bank that I worked for, with the Evil Hag, I had applied for a job in the bank's Trust department, but I hadn't gotten it because I didn't have a degree at that time. Now I did, and so I applied again and got the job. The department had many various names, but I'm going to refer to it strictly as the Trust department because it amuses me....bank...trust....big evil corporations....hee.

I went to work for a really nice guy, who happens to be a lawyer. Cue the lawyer jokes...and I've got a ton of 'em...but he was really a nice person, and a great example of how I'd like to be as a boss. Since he's still working for the big o'l bank, and I respect the hell out of him, we'll just call him Mr. Lawyer. Mr. Lawyer and I were a department of two, working on accounts of clients who had passed away. Perhaps it is no real surprise that I ended up working in such a morbid field...I've had a lifelong fascination with the paranormal and odd occurrences, a few brushes with the occult as a young teenager, and was a bit of a hippy child/goth girl in college. My baby sis was about 13 or 14 when I went to work with Mr. Lawyer, and when she saw my business card for the first time with the word "Estates" under my title, she suggested that we add the line "We see dead people" on the card. *snerk* The bank has NO sense of humor, however, so I never suggested it.

Most of the clients that we had were really, really old folks, and it never bothered me to be working on the estate of someone who had kicked it of heart failure at 87. We had the occasional younger person, but mostly these were folks who had lived long, healthy lives, and who were very wealthy, had wanted for nothing. Their heirs were a whole 'nother story. I can't tell you how many phone calls I had from nieces, nephews, cousins, and much more distant relations wanting to know where their money was even before Aunt Edna was in the ground.

Many of the stories I have from that time are things that I certainly shouldn't be telling on teh internets, as it would be a breach of confidentiality. At least, I think it would if I was still working for ye olde evile bank, and if I gave enough detail for you to figure out who these people were/are, but since I have not worked for the big ol bank in 3 years, I don't think it is illegal. I think it would be completely unethical to give away enough detail to allow even RL friends to be able to identify them. SOOOO, I'll have to tread very carefully here.

One of my favorite heirs was the daughter of a dead guy, and best illustrates the old axiom, "The wealthy aren't strange, they're eccentric." She showed up to our first meeting after her father's death wearing a sundress, a long sleeved t-shirt under the dress; socks, and Birkenstock sandals. It was January. In Ohio. There were 3 inches of snow on the ground. And she complained about being cold. She was one of the very few who wasn't a money-grubbing brat, however, and I'm being honest when I say that she was one of my favorite heirs.

The two heirs that I disliked almost the most of all of them had to be a pair of sisters who despised one another. The estate I worked on was their mother's, their father having passed on years ago. This was one of the larger estates I worked on...and to put that into perspective, a short government/history lesson is required.

At the time I was doing this work, the bank wouldn't take on an estate unless they could get a fee of about $100,000. Now I never saw a dime of that, and neither did Mr. Lawyer. The bank sure did, though. In the state of Ohio, the fees are based on the amount of the gross estate. So the bank could charge 1% of the first $100,000 ($10,000), 3% of the next $300,000 ($30,000) and I can't even remember what the balance was. Maybe 3% on the balance of the gross estate. So the bank could charge $40,000 on $400,000 worth of assets, and if the whole estate was worth $1 mil, then the fee would be in the $90,000 range. The ones I worked on were big estates. Small estates for Mr. Lawyer and I were in the $800,000 range. Big ones were over $10 million.

These two heirs I'm going to kvetch about were the sole beneficiaries of a BIG estate. Money, money, money, honey. And they hated each other with a passion and ferocity that you rarely see except in the most bitter of divorces. They were sisters, close in age. The assets were huge, real estate, cars, stocks....and these two morons were fighting over the sheets and towels in mom's linen closet. They fought over the holiday decorations and family pictures too, but I get that. My great-aunt had most of my great-grandmother's 1950s era Christmas tree decorations, and I would have loved to have them; they went to other family members, and given the chance, I would have fought for them. Sheets and towels? Um, not so much.

One of my favorite parts of that job was going into the houses of the decedents and doing an inventory of every item in the house. Which I will freely admit is morbid and creepy. Yes, we spent time in houses were people had actually died. Mr. Lawyer and I usually did that sort of thing ourselves, and there were strict rules about staying in sight of one another at all times. Not because of superstition, but because the bank took a pretty dim view of theft on the job. When we were in the dead person's house, we would be looking specifically for tax records, bank statements, statements from investment accounts, other important papers, but also we'd be on the lookout for artwork, antique furniture, clues about other assets the person had. I liked doing that because it got us out of the office. But also I liked it because it taught me a few things about human nature, and because I'm a nosy busybody.

We almost always found cash in the freezer. And under the mattress. People think they're so clever when it comes to hiding money, but they're so predictable. Human beings are creatures of habit. Mr. Lawyer even had one where he found stacks of cash on the steel i-beams in the basement...unfortunately, that was one he did before I went to work with him, but he always checked the i-beams in every house we went into, because you never knew what you were going to find. We found cash stuffed in filing cabinets, behind old framed cross-stitch samplers, in the medicine cabinet.

I must note that we did house inventories only when there wasn't a surviving spouse or other family member who lived with the decedent. So there were never family members hovering around when we did this. It was far too distressing for a family member to witness complete strangers going through Uncle Ernie's bottom drawers. And we did. We went through every single drawer, every single shelf, in every single room. We cleaned out the refrigerator, we gathered up the mail, took care of a myriad of details. We had a checklist that ran to 17 pages full of stuff that needed done pretty quickly after someone passed away.

I worked with Mr. Lawyer for 5 years, spending almost more time with him than with my spouse. We had a really great working relationship. Get your mind out of the gutter, there was none of that. He wasn't my type, and he is the same age as my dad, so ick. He was a great example of how to treat your staff; when I made mistakes, he would say things like, "You ought to be more careful" or "Slow down and take your time." He was gentle, extremely patient, nice, generally a good guy. I think we made a good team because I'm abrasive, bitchy, and impatient. We often did the good cop/bad cop thing when we needed to on various cases, even once switching roles so that he was the bad guy. Which was really hard for him to pull off...when he gets really pissed off, he says things like, "Jiminy Christmas" and "Gosh Darn it". When *I* get really pissed off, I say things like "Kiss my ass, motherfucker."

By the time I moved on from that job, I'd had more than enough of the bank's politics, policies, and the general garbage I had to do each day. Like somehow it had become my responsibility to sort the department's mail, and don't even get me started about the department's coffee service and how it became the responsibilities of the assistants to clean up the coffee area when everyone drank it. Stuff like that just burns me up. So I left with few regrets. Just about the only one is that I don't have the opportunity to bounce ideas, thoughts, and theories off of Mr. Lawyer on a daily basis anymore; his opinions tended to be rational, reasonable, well thought out. I miss a few other co-workers as well. But I really miss my free daily copy of The Wall Street Journal...

If it is Monday

Then I must be politicking. I didn't watch even a second of the Oscars last night, but I was checking all the usual places where I look at fashion faux pas. Yes, yes, yes, for all my blustering about being a political wonk, I am a girly girl who likes looking at the dresses. On MSN, I noted that Al and Tipper Gore were at the Oscars, and so I did a bit more digging to discover that An Inconvenient Truth won for best documentary. Which leads me to the politics portion of the post.

Along with most of the rest of the country, I voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. I didn't like him a whole lot, and I despise his wife Tipper for the PMRC. Course, the joke's kind of on her in that one, isn't it, since music with those stickers on the CDs do tend to sell more, as Steven Tyler noted back in 1980-something at the VMAs.

Anyway. Rolling Stone Magazine did an article a while back about Al Gore and how he could win the presidency if he choose to run. I get Rolling Stone, but I didn't read that particular article. The current issue, RS1020, however, has an article about Barak Obama. Which I did read. I've not yet made a decision about who I am going to vote for when the time does finally come for nominating a democratic presidential candidate. I like some of them more than others, but don't know enough about some to make an informed decision. Plus, let us not forget that the 2008 primaries are, oh, 13 months away.

I am surprised by the intelligence of the political reporting in RS, because I tend to think of them as only a music mag, but the article about Barak is surprising and made me think more about possibly voting for him. As much as it is TIME! for a female president, I just don't think that Hillary is electable. Too many people just can't stand her. And while I don't understand the varied reasons why they don't like her, I think that might be an insurmountable barrier to election.

Writing about....writing.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about writers. Biographies, profiles, and such of folks who are honest to goodness published authors. So many of them state unequivocally; “I always wanted to be a writer.” Plus blah blah blah about how they wrote books as kids, majored in English in college, did “creative writing” classes out the wazoo.

Here’s the thing. I’m working on a novel of my own, but I never wanted to necessarily write the great American novel. I’ve been a READER my whole life, someone who loves to read, a bibliophile, since I was perhaps 4. I never had plans, really, to write a book…I’d much rather read one. The writing of MY novel grew out of the frustration that I’ve not been able to find much lately that I enjoyed reading. I hardly think I’m going to set the world on fire with my little story. Still no delusions about writing the great American novel.

And of course, since I have a business degree, I’ve really got no earthly idea just how to go about writing a novel. Storyboarding, what’s that? But what began as a short story has grown into roughly 100 pages, and the fun I’m having working on it more than makes up for the fact that I don’t think it is really publishable. Not in its current format, anyway. Publishers choose books to print based on saleability, not really the fact that something is well written or poorly written. Publishers, after all, are in business primarily to make money, not to share great works of literature with the masses. Those are called LIBRARIES, y’all.

I don’t want to share the story just yet. At least, I don’t think I do. I’m on the fence about that right now. I’ve talked to DH about it, but in yet another staggering bit of proof that opposites attract, DH isn’t a reader at all. Although he’s interested in what I’m working on, he’s not gung-ho to read it. I think he’d almost rather gouge out one of his own eyes than sit down to read one of the classics.

The more I work on it, though, the more I want to TALK about it, and talking about it is tough if I haven’t shared it with anyone. I’ve also been entertaining ridiculous fantasies of book tours and interviews with the press asking the silly questions they always ask authors…”How much of the main character is YOU?” (She isn’t much like me, being practiced at deception and hiding things from people, but yeah, we share some traits. She’s blonde.) “What does your mother think of the sex scenes?” (Ummm, I’ll get back to ya on that one. I imagine she will be proud and horrified, in equal measures. Proud that I’ve written a novel and horrified that I am pretty graphic.) “Where did the genesis of this story come from?” (I’ve always used my imagination to dispel boredom, to help myself relax, to entertain myself, and the love story part of it was initially just a fantasy.) “Is the lover’s character based on anyone?” (Not really. Not exactly. I don’t know. Maybe. Yes? An amalgamation of many different people, but disguised so that they hopefully wouldn’t recognize themselves. I know who I’d like to have the lover played by in a movie….and talk about premature and fantasies, I’m not even done writing the book yet!)

And the more I re-read it, as an ongoing effort to make sure that I haven’t made a bunch of mistakes, such as describing a room as pink and then later saying it is red, the more I think maybe it is total crap. The typical writer’s paranoia that nothing they do is any good. Even L.M. Montgomery, a Victorian era writer, wrote about 2 AM doubts and fears that her work was crappola. She wrote a little series you might have heard of, called the “Anne of Green Gables” books. Seven or eight of them in all. Plus another series known to fans as “The Emily Books”. LM’s stuff has been translated into 36 languages, and when I discovered them in the 1980s, they were enjoying a resurgence due to a PBS miniseries.

Really, I don’t know what to do about the whole mess.

Winter Wonderland

Skiing is one of the joys of life for me. I don't get to do it very often, but when I do, it makes me happy to be alive.

I had a perfect day on the slopes. Perfect weather...in the 20s, sunny, very little wind. Near-perfect conditions...groomed trails means that there has been snow recently, and the resort has taken some giant machines and driven them over the snow, making it uniform in depth. It is rare, in this region of the country, to be able to ski on fresh powder, the glory, be-all end-all of skiing conditions. At least, it is for me, because I don't live close enough to a ski resort to head for the hills as soon as fresh snow falls.

Every year, the first time I go skiing has the same emotions attached to it. A little bit of trepidation...what if I've forgotten the skills I've learned over the past 23 years that I've been a skier? A little bit of worry...what if I fall? (I am compelled to note here that I rarely fall. I'm too cautious of a skier, I don't take unnecessary risks, I rarely ski so fast that I can't stop myself. What can I say? I'd rather not be injured.) And a lot of elation, because as the saying goes, even a bad day skiing is better than a good day at the office.

Standing at the top of the hill, I take a deep breath of cold, clean country air. Peek'n Peak's elevation is only 1800 feet, so you can't really call it a mountain. At least not in my book. I have on a pair of goggles, a band around my ears, my iPod, a neck wrap, my ski jacket, ski pants, gloves, and three layers of clothes underneath the ski gear. On my back is a Camelback, a hydration system that I find imperative for a good day on the slopes. It holds about 64 ounces of water, the RDA of 8 eight ounce glasses of water. It has a tube that goes over my right shoulder from the bladder that holds the water. The bladder is held in a backpack, in which I also carry lip balm and tissues. I sip water at need by biting on the tube, not the classiest method going, but it sure beats carrying around bottles of water.

On my feet are new, brand-spanking new ski boots, bought last week. I've never had brand new equipment before, so that's exciting. My skis are Kastle, very old. I have a pair of Scott poles, also very old, but I see no need to replace either. They still work, and I have newer bindings on the skis, so they're fine, safe, and effective. I get occasional guff from other skiers while on the lifts, when they see my skis, asking me just how old the skis are, but with new skis and bindings setting you back about $500....yeah, my old stuff is fine, thanks. I got the Kastles when I was 13 or 14, and they were used when I got them, so a good guess at their age would be between 15 and 20 years old. I've replaced the bindings twice in that time, most recently maybe 5 years ago.

So the air is clean, cold, and crisp, and as I glide off of the chairlift, I look around for a map to remind me of the layout of Peek'n. Yes, that is the main resort that I go to, as it is within 2 hours driving distance, and yes, I go there between 2 and 5 times every winter, but they change things around during the summers, and anyway, I like maps. I stand in front of a map the size of a highway billboard, and ponder my routes for the next several hours. I don't like to start out with a run that might overtax my abilities, so I plan carefully.

The sound of the snow under the runners of the skis brings back floods of memories. Racing my sister at 11, 12 years old and again as adults, and she beats me every single time. My dad, encouraging me to enter my first NASTAR race, an amateur ski competition that I first tried around 11 years old. Getting stuck on the chairlift with a family friend at Peek'n, for over two hours in the late 80s, freezing my butt off. J-bars, T-lifts, rope tows. Skiing in Breckenridge with K and E, in the mid-90s. It isn't quite a crunching sound, more like when you rub two pieces of plastic up against one another. Not a grinding, either. Movie sound effects people use cornflakes and cornstarch encased in cotton sheets to simulate the sound of snow under skis...and that's a pretty good facsimile of the sound. Parallel skiing throws small bits of snow away from the skier, and the sssscuuuscchhh of the snow flying this way and that behind other skiers is soothing, right, exhilarating.

Having the iPod while skiing was a new thing for me. When my parents would take us skiing when we were kids, they disapproved of us listening to the Walkman while skiing...dangerous, they said. So it is. At the volume my 14-year-old self would have listened to it, very dangerous. Not that their edict of "No music on the slopes" stopped me from having it, but it was bulky, hard to hide, and cumbersome to carry. My old ski jackets always had inside pockets, but by the end of the day, I would be looking for someplace else to stash the Walkman, rather than carrying it on my person. The iPod, on the other hand, has an armband that I carry it around on, and it is no thicker than 3 credit cards stacked one on top of the other. So not bulky, not heavy, and I wear it on my arm every day at the gym, so nothing out of the ordinary.

I started the day on the hill listening to my "Supernatural" playlist, which is a bunch of classic rock tunes used on the television show. "Carry on Wayward Son" by Kansas. "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult. "Rock of Ages" and "Pyromania" by Def Leppard. "Working Man" by Rush. "Wayward Son" is something I like to run to on the treadmill, and I can now report that it works well for flying downhill on skis too. I've got about 45 minutes of music on the SN playlist, so when I heard "Reaper" for the second time, I stopped skiing for a minute to change over to something else. Since I didn't organize a playlist specifically for the ski trip (which would have been smart), I just told the iPod to play the 25 most played songs, which is a pretty eclectic mix of Prince, U2, Def Leppard, Red Wanting Blue, The Format, and Dave Matthews Band.

Listening to Prince (old school Prince, mostly from the Purple Rain soundtrack) while traveling somewhere around 30 miles an hour on a ski slope is a pretty surreal experience. I have a remix of "Let's Go Crazy", probably my favorite Prince tune ever, that runs almost 8 minutes long, and I heard it about 3 times. That song is going to be stuck in my head for a week, I swear.

I think I've written before about how difficult it is for me to NOT sing at the top of my lungs whenever I have the iPod on. I was a singer all through school, trained with a private opera coach from 13 to about 17, entered contests, the whole bit. I tell you that not to brag, but to tell you that I'm a decent singer. I don't sing in public (meaning on stage) anymore, but I've never been able to resist the urge to sing in the car, in the shower, and yes, while skiing. When Red Wanting Blue came on, I was alone on the chairlift, and I gave in to the urge to belt out the chorus of "Audition". Fortunately, if anyone noticed, I didn't see them.

I skied all alone this time, having been unable to convince anyone to play hooky along with me. And while that's a bit of a shame, it isn't the end of the world. I crave solitude, it is an essential part of my nature. There are days that if I had a personal motto it would be "LEAVE ME ALONE!", so I didn't feel lonely while out there. There is, of course, a crucial difference between being alone and being lonely, and I was alone. I didn't lack for company...since it was President's Day in the US (Perhaps our most useless holiday? Discuss amongst yourselves...) all government offices, schools, and banks were closed, there were a bunch of other nuts out there on the hills with me. I talked to tons of people while the chairlifts took us to the top of the hills. Mostly other Ohioans, which entertained me a lot, as Peek'n is located in Clymer, New York.

I rode the chairlift early in the day with a fella named Jeff who did his darnedest to convince me to come back to his ski condo at the end of the day to party with a bunch of his friends. I haven't been hit on in a really long time, so it took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on. I'd been feeling very mischievous when I got on the chairlift, though, so when he asked my name, instead of giving my real name, I told him "Lucy." Thank goodness for that intuition, because the further up the hill that chairlift got, the more uncomfortable this guy made me. I've introduced myself as Lucy before, last year when I was writing food articles, I interviewed a couple of different people, and always identified myself initially with the pen name. I always told the interviewees that Lucy is a pen name, however, not wanting to be dishonest. This idiot on the chairlift got no more than "Lucy" and the name of the big city in my area out of me, and he'll have a right difficult time tracking me down with just those two things, fortunately. Men. We love ya, but honestly, you're all dorks.

I'll be out on the slopes again on Sunday, the 25th, with a few members of my family. I know that most of the rest of the Northern hemisphere is wishing for spring, but I'm hoping winter holds on for a few more weeks, at least, so I can get a few more runs in before the snow melts for another year.

HOOKY DAY!!!

Because I am a very firm believer in caring for my own mental health, today I am taking a hooky day today to go skiing. See ya on the slopes!

Technology? So Rocks.

Egad, I sound like I'm 13.

I've been working on the book all day, doing laundry, watching my television show (which yes, I did buy the whole season on iTunes so now I can watch it on demand, whenever I please, cue music that indicates drooling) and randomly surfing the internet.

What did we do before the internet when we wanted to know what the population of Peoria, Illinois, is? Or what streets cross Ventura Boulevard in Los Angles? We had the library as the only source for information like that. And it would have taken hours, hours I tell you, to find some of the more obscure information that is readily available online.

I posted a message on one of the fan forums talking about trouble I was having with teh internet yesterday, and realized, after I posted, that many of the other members of the board are high school students. (Yeah. Don't tell me about my lack-of-maturity when it concerns the fan forums. I know. I know! At least I'm not spending all of my waking hours reading/writing fan fic. Not yet, anyway.) Kids who will graduate high school in 2007 were most likely born in 1990. I turned 16 in 1990....therefore, I could reasonably be a parent to most of these kids. Yikes.

I didn't have an e-mail address in high school...teh internet was something that government contractors were still playing with back then. Now I have at least 5...Lucy's, one in my real name, 2 for work, one on Juno (my very first ever...you didn't even need an isp for Juno back then, you just dialed up, downloaded your e-mail, and hung up....keee-rist, I'm old), plus the Yahoo e-mail that I use when I buy things online.....


I think about my grandfathers, both of whom are no longer with us, when I think about the strides that technology has made in my lifetime. Grandpa S, who despised computers, he would hate, hate cell phones. I can only imagine what he'd have to say about them. He often quoted the "garbage in, garbage out" theory about computers, and I can't even fathom what he would think of my cell phone (I have a Motorola Razr, which has the capability to do pictures, video, be a personal digital assistant, and make phone calls). He would be annoyed by it, mostly, I think. Especially all the ringtones that I've added to the phone.

Grandpa B, I wonder what on earth he'd think of the internet. Grandma B is still around, and she does not have a computer. I was in serious withdrawal when I went to see her last year. I talked to her about the amazing things that you can do online, but she has a busy and active social life, and claims to not have 'time' for the internet. *ponders her own life sans internet for a second...shudders....*

I had a third "grandpa", a surrogate Grandpa L, and when he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, he asked me to research experimental treatments for him. Which I did, online, and forwarded the most promising to his daughter's e-mail address. I remember the telephone conversation I had with him about that...he was surprised that I'd been able to do everything I had done without ever leaving the chair I was sitting in when he called me.

I am continually astonished and amazed at what can be done from your computer. And I say this often about other areas of my life...I'm excited about the possibilities, the promise of what's to come tomorrow.

More things from NPR

I was listening to NPR this morning and heard a few things that I wanted to share.

First, this story from Weekend Edition Saturday, which is about a television show featuring 4 Middle Eastern students exploring America. Sounds really, really interesting, but it isn't airing in America, so check YouTube or similar for the show. They interviewed Lara Abou Saifan, one of the cast members. She is Lebanese, and was here in America filming the show during last summer's war between Hezbollah and Israel. Can you even imagine? There's a war going on at home, and you're in a country where no one really cares about anything that isn't happening in their own backyard. It must have been awful for her.

The other thing that I thought about as they interviewed her was that she was the only female cast member. I don't know how they treat women in Lebanon, but I do know that the Saudis don't let women drive, and one of the cast mates was a Saudi, so I wonder if she had any trouble of the chauvinistic variety. The interview, of course, didn't address this.

Next, on Weekend America, I heard a story about rice, and an art exhibit. Called "All of the people in all of the world", it uses grains of rice to represent various populations. Like how many people fit into a baseball stadium. Or how many people in America will be born today, how many will die, how many people in the world are HIV positive. When you see numbers that are incomprehensible, like 64 million, represented by grains of rice, you start to get a feel for just how many that really is. They weigh the rice, rather than counting it, when the numbers get high.

Other than these two things, I've got nothing to share. My online time has been mostly taken up with fan forums (really, don't ask. I'm embarrassed enough about it as it is.) and my book these days. The book is going...slowly. I'm at a point where I'm not stuck, exactly, but at a loss as to how to get from where I am right now to the next action sequence, without dragging it out too much. But in the six weeks or so that I've been working on it, I've written almost 90 pages, when I copy and paste it into a Word document. So it is apparently going all right. Right?

Regularly scheduled posting interrupted....

I've caught whatever is going around...intestinal, sinus, and other related distresses, and won't be online until I feel better. DH had this for about a week.....ugh. I'm exhausted, and going back to bed.

Blah. And meh.

The winter storm dumped about 9 inches of snow on us. I went in to work, having no other choice, and spent the whole day doing....nothing. Work was dead, due to the weather. Blah. Boring.

And then on the way home, I was listening to NPR, and I heard a story that has me thinking about the original reason that I started writing this blog, the abortion debate.

In all honesty, I cannot comment about this story because I am not qualified. There are a bunch of states that have passed what are called MISSing Angels laws, which is legislation that gives the parents of a stillborn child a right to a birth certificate. Otherwise, a death certificate is issued, but no birth certificate. I went searching for my own birth certificate, out of curiosity, and sure enough, across the top of it, it says, "Certificate of Live Birth". Therefore, at a stillbirth, one would not be issued.

I don't feel that I can comment about this because I am not the parent of a stillborn child, and far be it from me to say that I understand what these people are going through. Unless you have lost a child, you could never understand what these people feel. I will say that the idea makes me both uneasy...and very sad.


Uneasy, because the anti-choice people have been trying for years to get the law to recognize a fetus as a person, which ipso facto, would make abortion murder under the law in all 50 states, with blatant disregard to Roe v. Wade. The right to have an abortion hangs by such a tenuous thread in this country that any movement towards the anti-choice side could break that thread. And that scares me. As I have said time and time again, faced with an unwanted pregnancy, I have no earthly idea what the heck I would do. My answer to that question has changed over the years, as my life situation has changed. When I was single, 17, and starting college, the answer might have been radically different from the answer that I might give today, at over 30, happily married, with a job that has health insurance. I really don't know what I would do. What I do know is that I don't want a bunch of old white men deciding what I can or can not do with my body.

Sad, because as a woman they interviewed for the story says, she doesn't want to be in the midst of the abortion debate...she just wants a birth certificate for her baby, stillborn at 8 months gestation. I could hear the pain in her voice, and it breaks my heart. There are no easy answers here. Meh.

Listening to: Snowplows driving past, ice breaking off of my gutters, tires spinning in unplowed snow.

WEATHER!

I spend a lot of time complaining about the weather. Which is a very silly thing to do, as weather is one of those things that is beyond our control. You can't change the weather. Complaining about it is a favorite pastime among people who live here, though, I think mostly because the weather is so shitty most of the time. Cold, grey, rainy most of the year, and hazy, hot, and humid in the summer. I'm not the only one who complains a lot about it...we have a saying here, that if you don't like the weather in Oh-hia-ia, wait 15 minutes, it will change.

So this post will be somewhat out of character, because I'm not really complaining about the weather, but (mostly) glorifying in it.

I love the snow. Ohio is grand central at the moment for a heck of a snowstorm, and my corner of the world is forecast about 18 total inches of snow. I live far enough away from Lake Erie that I'm not in the 'snowbelt' region, so I whine a whole lot that we never get what they actually forecast. I would LOVE to get 18 inches of snow, but it probably won't happen.

I spent a moment standing in the snowstorm this afternoon. Listening to the gentle hiss of the snow falling. If you've never experienced snow, then you wouldn't know that it deadens the sounds of everything around you. Traffic is quieter. High heels on a sidewalk don't have their usual staccato tap. The snow makes everything look cleaner. More peaceful. As if everything is right with the world, as it sleeps under a white blanket.

That is, if you're at home, with a good book, a good lover, or a good movie, a warm blanket and comfy sweats. And if you have plenty of hot cocoa. If you're out in that mess, it just sucks.

The Vault

Tuesday may hereafter be designated as brain-dumping day. Perhaps.

I wrote a snippet about working for the cash vault of a bank a few days ago and said that those were stories for another day. Since then, I’ve been thinking about that job, and remembering the funny things that happened there.

I went to work for a big bank when I was 19 or 20 years old, in 1994 or 1995. Can’t really remember exactly when, and it is no longer important. The bank that I worked for is what is known in the financial services industry as a “super-regional” bank, a huge establishment that is not nationwide, but extends its reach over a footprint of 6 contiguous midwestern states, with operations in about another 5 states not connected to the footprint. They offer all of the traditional banking services, and I started out as a part-time teller in an office close to home.

Being a bank teller is not easy work. When you wander into a branch of your local bank to cash a check, that teller who waits on you (if you in fact go into the office and don’t use the ATM) has been through at least 20 hours of training in policy, procedure, operations, customer service….it is a lot of work for very little pay.

I think that first year I made maybe $8,000. And I despised it. The branch manager at my first branch was an evil hag, who must have taken the advanced class of “How to NOT manage people”, because she was awful at any and all human resources issues. Her favorite way to discipline someone for anything was to wait until there was a lobby full of customers and then berate the person from inside her office while they were waiting on someone. She and I clashed nearly daily.

Hindsight has given me some perspective, and in retrospect, I should have probably not told her that she was a textbook case of how to not run a department or an office. Y’see, I was in my first year of business school, majoring in management, which is enough knowledge to cause problems, but not fix them. If I had to work with her today, I would do some things differently, but I would have still left.

I worked with the evil hag for about 6 or 7 months. I began applying for transfers anywhere within the system as soon as I was eligible. One job posting that caught my eye was for the International Teller, who handled all of the region’s foreign currency. Having lived in Europe, I could do currency conversions in my sleep, and it seemed like something that would be more fun, so I applied. I was thrilled when I got the job, which was full time, and in another city, about 60 miles away from home.

The International Teller’s office was located inside the main cash vault. At first, I was too busy cleaning up the cubicle area allotted to me to notice what else was going on around me, but I came up for air about a month after starting there. The former international teller hadn’t been the neatest person, and I tossed stuff that went back to the mid-80s. As you can imagine, this made obsessive-compulsive me absolutely tweak the fuck out.

When I had everything arranged as I needed it to be for efficiency’s sake, I felt able to assist my co-workers in what they were doing. The international teller job could have reasonably been a part time position, because there was relatively little for me to do. I bought and sold currency with a New York City trading house, sure, and that was fun, but I didn’t have near enough to do. This suited me, though, because I was in my last year at University by then, and I used downtime to study.

The rest of the people that I worked with did very different things than I did every day. The vault processed money from the Federal Reserve for distribution to branches of the bank in our region, processed any counterfeit money that the bank received (more about that in a second) and processed deposits from big box retailers that were delivered to the vault by armored couriers, plus processed change through huge coin sorting machines in the coin room.

The most interesting of these activities was processing the money that came from the Fed. The vault’s head teller would order money from the Fed on a weekly basis, and sometimes they sent new money (who doesn’t love the smell of new money?) and other times they sent currency that had already been in circulation. But when I say that she ordered money, I mean that she ordered millions of dollars. Millions and millions of dollars. Four million in twenty dollar bills wasn’t out of the ordinary. Four million dollars in cash is HEAVY, y’all. The couriers would bring it in on pallets. There were of course secure doors that you had to go through, and a process that we had in place to make sure that the couriers were legit, but it always worried me that they brought the cash in clear plastic bags, sealed and imprinted, yes, but clear plastic….I used to tell the people that I worked with that if anyone with criminal intentions paid any amount of attention, they would see a pattern of days and times when the money from Uncle Sam was delivered. Hit us on the right day, and you could have made off easily with two mil in cash. We never were, and I don’t know if that’s because no one was paying attention or if we were extraordinarily lucky.

The bank no longer does things this way, which is why I feel all right about telling these stories. The vault is no longer located at my old office, and procedures are radically different, security has changed lots. This was eight or nine years ago after all, and I have not worked for this company at all for nearly 3 years now.

After the courier passed the security checks, we would do a ‘rough’ count, ensuring that the imprinted and sealed bags were in fact still sealed, and checking that each bag had the amount that it said it did. Then the couriers left, and we would move the cash into the most secure area, a real vault with the ship’s wheel on the door and a timed lock. The room inside the vault was about ten feet wide and five feet deep, with one wall entirely taken up by smaller safes. Those safes limited the amount of room that we had to move and work inside the vault, but it was where the cash was kept after it was counted.

Once inside the secure area, we would open the imprinted bags and begin a ‘bulk’ count of the money. Bulk counting means that you run the bills through a counting machine, which counts the number of bills but not the denominations, so if there is a one-dollar bill in the middle of the twenties, it doesn’t register. We did bulk counting to separate the bills into more manageable stacks; every denomination was bulked in stacks of 100 bills, which in twenties is $2000, and ‘bricked’ in packs of 5 of the stacks of 100 bills, making the bricks of twenties $10,000.

After the bulk count was done, and totals matched the paperwork, we would do a fine count. Fine counting means that you personally touch every single bill, you eyeball every bill, and this is where the biggest potential for theft occurs. It is also where you’re going to find a counterfeit bill, or a ten in the middle of the hundreds. American currency has a very specific ‘feel’ to it…the paper that it is printed on has a very high cotton content, and counterfeit bills ‘feel’ wrong. Even someone who doesn’t work with big bunches of money on a daily basis can feel the difference.

Fine counting takes forever. It would take several hours to process the money from the Fed. The first time I helped process a Fed transfer, I thought it was pretty exciting. Who can say that they personally handled a million dollars at work? Cool. The only problem, as I saw it, was that the money wasn’t mine.

In order to work in a place like that, you have to be bonded and have no criminal history. And while I thought it was pretty cool to put my hands on that much money, I had to get to the point where my thought process went something like this….”It is just paper. And it isn’t MY paper.” Because otherwise, you could easily drive yourself bonkers thinking about what you could do with so much money.

Two other funny things about money. One, it is filthy. Filthy, filthy, filthy dirty. New money’s ink rubs off on your hands, turning your fingers black. Old money is just dirty, and your hands turn black from touching it. We couldn’t wear gloves while handling it because that sense of touch is important to be able to feel for counterfeits. So my hands were always chapped from frequent washing. Secondly, have you heard urban myth/legend that the US currency tests positive for cocaine? True.

We had a spate of counterfeits come through the office, and it was part of my responsibilities to send the bills to the Secret Service, which is who handles all counterfeit claims. Now that would be an interesting job, working for the Secret Service.

Like anything involving the government, there was an extensive process in place to send counterfeit bills to the Secret Service, forms to fill out, a very specific way it had to be packaged. It took about a half hour to fill out the paperwork and package it all up. The funniest thing about it was that it had to be sent registered mail, and it went to a facility in the same city where my office was located. We couldn’t send it with the couriers.

The bills were being passed at branches of our bank, and the tellers would send them to us with a “suspicious” tag. I always felt bad when I had to contact a teller and let him or her know that we were going to send a short ticket to them for the amount of the bill. Counterfeits, you see, come in a bunch of different incarnations. The crudest take the numbers off of a higher bill and paste them onto a $1 or a $5 and then try to pass them as a $20, $50, or $100 bill. The more sophisticated are attempts to print your own $50 bills. Regardless, the teller who sent them to us was penalized for taking the bill as part of a deposit, if that was in fact how it came in. Sometimes customers would bring them in, thinking that the bill seemed off, and then the customer would be out the money, which never failed to piss them off. And I saw their point….what’s the sense in being honest if you’re going to be out the money? Try and pass it along to someone else, leave someone else holding the bag. Unfortunately, that’s just the way that it went, with the honest person being shorted. Many times a teller could pass the short back to the merchant who took the counterfeit bill in the first place, but a civilian had no recourse.

I worked for the vault for about a year, moving on to another division of the bank when I graduated from college. But those stories are, again, for another day.

Listening to: Online radio station, an eclectic mix of adult contemporary stuff including Los Lonely Boys, The Pretenders, Life House and Maroon 5.

Religion and Politics

Just when I think that only in America do we have trouble keeping the line between religion and politics, I hear something that makes me think twice. Now you know that separation of Church and State is one of the constitution's basic principals, yes? Just checking. To be precise and pedantic, here's the section of the constitution, which sets up the doctrine.

It seems that the Italian Parliament is all set to debate a bill which would give some rights to unmarried heterosexual couples and homosexual couples. This in no way allows for gay marriage in Italy, nor does it promote a 'gay agenda' (which I must point out is possibly one of the most offensive phrases in the English language.)

Pope Benedictine the 16th has strongly condemned this effort to give some rights of inheritance, among other things, to unmarried couples, issuing a statement through the Vatican publication L'Osservatore Romano, saying that it "harms the family". Sheesya, right. Because stable couples who happen to not be married are a big threat to families, be they hetero or homo. Didn't you know that? Gosh, I feel threatened right now. Run for the hills, the unmarried couples of the world are going to ruin it for the married folks.

Here's a few tips for the Pope. Stay out of politics. Refrain from commenting on the differences between God's law and man's law, because it makes you sound stupid. Let the elected officials in Italy decide what is best for the citizens of Italy. Get a grip. It isn't 1325, it is 2007.

Planegate

Why, oh why, has Nancy Pelosi's airplane request been such big news?

Has everyone forgotten that President Idiot insisted on the same requirement for Denny Hastert?

Yeesh.

Scooter Libby

There is a lot that I want to say about the perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Most of it, I'm sure, is available from a myriad of other sources, but my opinion about the whole mess may not be.

First of all, I know what side of this whole debacle I ought to be on. The liberal side, which wants to string him up for outing a CIA agent. Yes, I agree, that was bad. Bad Scooter! And indicative, really, of the Idiot Administration's way of handling a problem. Ooohh, someone says that there's no WMDs in Iraq? Well, obviously, ob-vi-ous-ly, the way to deal with that is to discredit the critic's wife. Personal attacks on credibility being sooo much easier than actually talking about the facts, right?

And in many respects, I feel that if in fact Scooter outed Valerie Plame, maliciously, and then he lied about outing her, then yes, he ought to be strung up by his toenails, or whatever we're doing to punish the naughty this week. But on the other hand....this trial, at taxpayer expense, is essentially a he said-she said thing, with no real way to definitively prove anything one way or the other. So much high school style drama. There isn't forensic evidence that Scooter lied....how could there be? Sure, polygraph tests might show the truth, but in reality, there is no way show for certain what he knew, when he knew it, and who he told it to. There's also the fact that he's been charged with obstruction of justice and perjury when there's no underlying criminal case....usually obstruction of justice charges involve someone trying to cover up a homicide, for example. So the prosecutor has his work cut out for him in proving this case.

I'll admit that it is pretty darn damaging that a whole host of people have testified to the fact that he did, he did, he did it. I heard Nina Totenburg on NPR's Morning Edition this morning talking about how, in the tapes of the grand jury testimony, the prosecutor tiptoes around coming straight out and asking Libby if his boss (that would be Vice President Dick Cheney) told him to leak Plame's info, but the prosecutor never does come out and ask him directly, and nothing that Libby says through more than eight hours of testimony would indicate that Cheney did, in fact, tell him to release Plame's name.

Of course Libby never indicates that Cheney ordered him to out Plame; they're both reasonably intelligent people, and I would assume, being the conspiracy theorist that I am, that they'd be smart enough to have had these conversations about what to do, should either of them be in trouble, long before they ever got into trouble. Duh! Didn't you ever plan to do something you probably shouldn't have done, as a kid, and have the conversation with your friends, "Well, you just tell your mom xxx, and I'll tell my mom xxx, and we'll be fine." I know you did!! Guess what, those in political power are at least as smart as eight year olds, and they did the same thing.

At the heart of this whole trial for me is the issue of privacy. Yes, privacy. Valerie Plame had the right to privacy, the right to pursue a career that she was, by all accounts, good at and excited about, the right to live her life without such intense scrutiny, and that right was taken away from her. Whether Scooter Libby did it because his boss told him to, or not, the fact remains that Ms. Plame is no longer able to pursue her first choice of career, being a CIA spook, because she is now well known and recognizable. At the risk of sounding like I'm in high school, that's not fair. Not at all. Added to the fact that she is (as far as I know) no longer working for the CIA is the fact that her life could be in danger from this outing. Which is really unfair.

Privacy is, to me, one of those sacred rights. Yes, I know that I'm a big hypocrite for saying that, as I obsessively follow celebrity gossip. But! If you choose to be a celebrity, you know going into it that you're not going to have much of a chance at a private life. There are some trade offs...fabulously rich, the whole world on a string, screaming fangirls, et cetera. In general, I don't feel sorry for stars who whine about not being able to have a private life; I do feel sorry for them when the stalkeratzzi try to take pics of their kids or generally hound them. But I digress. Those of us who choose to go into less glamorous careers, who have ordinary lives, should be able to expect that our bidness isn't going to be splashed all over the six o'clock news. I dunno that being a CIA spook is an ordinary life, but for Valerie Plame, it was. The trial of Scooter Libby will resume on Monday. I'll be watching/listening.


Also: Wow. Wish I could write like this. Thanks to Mother Me for the link.